New LLodi Cloud Service Enhances Interactive Dashboards from Qlik, Tableau and Microsoft Power BI with Controls to Initiate Real-time Workflows Whenever Insights Are Discovered.

Interactive dashboards and analytics have emerged as a preferred way for today’s business professionals to gain the insights they need to effectively meet evolving customer demands and drive revenue. But these same dashboards often fail to provide a means to act on the insights they deliver. Instead, business decision makers and analysts typically need to separately access CRM, marketing automation, ERP or other business systems to act on the analytics insights discovered in their business intelligence (BI) tools – which can delay or even prevent meaningful business improvements.

BiyCloud, a global leader in BI services in the cloud, set a goal to address this gap. They saw an opportunity to transform BI/analytics processes by creating closed-loop, completely interactive analytic systems that could seamlessly trigger workflows and actions in other business systems. BiyCloud selected Scribe Online, Scribe Software’s integration platform as a service (iPaaS), to build its interactive data intelligence integration solution. This solution turns analytics dashboards from leading BI providers such as Qlik, Tableau, and Microsoft Power BI into bi-directional interactive analytics systems, which empower users to initiate actions in other business systems directly from their BI tool of choice. The result is BiyCloud’s LLodi – a cloud-based, connected data intelligence solution, delivering real-time integrations with direct impact to the business.

Business Intelligence: Interactivity Leads to Competitive Advantage

Over the past decade, business intelligence systems have evolved from static reporting systems to include interactive visualization tools and dashboards for exploration and data discovery. Tableau, Qlik, and Microsoft Power BI became leaders in this field because they reduce the cost and time to create analytics and give business users the ability to explore data freely, without being limited by static views or fixed filtering criteria.

The result: more people than ever have access to business data, and have far more powerful analytic tools at their fingertips. In addition, the companies that have embraced these interactive analytics have become more agile and have more opportunities to gain competitive advantage. They use interactive analytics in areas such as customer segmentation, product innovation, and sales and marketing performance, while competitors that have not embraced interactive analytics can suffer from a lack of customer insight and slower response times.

A Glaring Gap: Data Intelligence Integration

Interactive dashboards, however, are only as powerful as the data they hold, so companies that can easily assimilate data from multiple sources into their dashboards ultimately get the best insights. Even still, a glaring gap still exists for many BI users – data interactivity doesn’t automatically translate to an ability to respond to those insights in real time.

“Business intelligence tools have become more interactive, but far too often they are still leading people down a dead-end road,” said Juan Hortal, CEO of BiyCloud. “We hear all the time from organizations that they want the ability to act on their discoveries directly from the interactive dashboards instead of having to go outside of the business intelligence tool to take action. We saw this as a critical deficiency in BI, but also an opportunity to add great value.”

Making Interactive Dashboards Bi-directional with LLodi and Scribe

BiyCloud set out to make interactive dashboards into bi-directional systems, using data integration to not only bring data into the analytics from multiple sources, but also to give users the power to send action requests out to other systems directly from the dashboards.

“We were familiar with the Scribe iPaaS because of its ability to quickly get data flowing in real-time between important business systems such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SAP, and Netsuite,” said Nacho Bibian, Head of Operations, BiyCloud. “Scribe’s focus on ease of use and agility was a perfect fit for the expectations of customers using interactive dashboards from Tableau, Qlik, and Microsoft Power BI.”

Scribe’s Request/Reply capability, which is used to develop event-driven integration flows, gave BiyCloud the ability to add controls to Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI dashboards that could initiate actions within the source systems.

“Scribe’s Request/Reply capability is very powerful. With it we give users the ability to act on insights immediately when they make a discovery,” said Nacho Bibian. “Scribe gave us the power to create a host of workflows requested by our users, including workflows that reach out to other business systems to exchange data, create tasks, or spur other actions. Now, with just a single click, users can drive action in multiple systems without ever having to contact IT or even leave the dashboard that fueled their decision. That kind of immediacy is what inspired us to build LLodi.”

LLodi is a SaaS-based solution that can be added on to any BI application, requiring no modifications to the BI application itself. It consists of a widget to handle communication between the application and other systems of interest, as well as a platform to manage, control, edit and monitor the business processes that the widget initiates. The Scribe iPaaS actually manages the bi-directional data flow between the BI application and other systems and orchestrates the workflows requested by the user. The combination of LLodi and an interactive visualization or dashboard allows business users to discover new insights and quickly act on those insights to improve data quality or business performance.

Two examples of LLodi in action include:

1. A sales manager uses a Qlik dashboard to analyze aggregated sales performance data. Based on the data, he decides to boost sales in one region by running a new promotion. Using the LLodi widget on the dashboard, he enters the Product Category, Region, Discount Level, and Promotion Duration in days. When he pushes the Submit button, LLodi creates a campaign in Salesforce, and within the campaign it creates a task for each sales representative in the region and an opportunity for each account in the region. LLodi also inserts details taken from the BI application, such as the probability of success and the expected revenue. Previously, to achieve the same outcome, the sales manager would have signed into Salesforce and manually setup the campaign and each task and opportunity.

2. A marketer uses Tableau to analyze sales data and segment accounts based on a recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) analysis. Once the marketer determines the rating for a specific account, she clicks on the LLodi widget, enters the rating for the account and hits Submit. LLodi sends the request to Microsoft Dynamics CRM to update the Rating Group of the account with the correct value. It is a seamless workflow that allows the marketer to enhance the data in the source system without having to leave the dashboard or her analysis process.

Integration is a Critical Success Factor: Scribe Software

The driving force of LLodi is its ability to integrate among leading business intelligence systems and business and marketing operations systems. Scribe’s Web API also allows LLodi to get data from on-premises and cloud systems into and out of business intelligence tools in near real-time.

LLodi comes with a library of pre-configured workflow elements for Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI partners who want to add LLodi’s actionable components to the dashboards they create for clients. It is also available to Integration Partners that want to develop custom workflows or unique industry solutions. In either case, the combined BiyCloud and Scribe solution is intuitive enough to empower non-technical users to configure and analyze data without being programming experts.

LLodi’s Benefits

For customers:
• User Independence: Empowers business users to initiate actions in other systems, such as fixing incorrect data or creating tasks for sales representatives, without IT support.
• Improved Agility: Transmits real-time decisions to marketing, sales, operations, and other systems for immediate action.
• Easy Setup: Ability to add actionable controls to any existing interactive dashboard from Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI. Requires virtually no modifications to existing dashboards.

For partners:
• A Powerful Ecosystem: LLodi can initiate workflows in dozens of leading applications, so business intelligence partners have unending opportunities to create custom solutions.
• A Customizable Widget: The heavy lifting is already done. Business intelligence partners simply customize aesthetic elements (labels, folders, etc.) and make the widget available to customers.
• Extended Integration: Leveraging BiyCloud’s template, integration partners can create their own maps and extend the solution into other applications to meet a more varied set of needs for their clients.
• A Value Add: For all partners, LLodi provides the opportunity to create new revenue streams quickly and easily.

We shall begin with our first post presenting Llodi, a new cloud service for management and automation of decisions based on analysis.

Up until now the tools for Business Intelligence offered the users an informed decision making, transforming data into knowledge. From now on, thanks to Llodi, the users will also be able to make decisions integrating the data which has been analyzed with their Business Intelligence platforms so that those very decisions can have an immediate impact in their business.

The first version of Llodi offers support for the main leaders of Gartner 2017’s Magic Quadrant: Tableau, Power BI and Qlik Sense. The users of these technologies, needless of changing tools, will be able to turn their BI system into a decision management system.

In the next posts the different characteristics and benefits of Llodi are to be described, the service offered by Llodi is aimed at all types of companies and users that will be able to have their system up and running without typing a single line of code.

Today is a great day for all our team, after more than one and a half years of development of the new service and the settlement of the first clients, we are starting worldwide commercialization.

This website stores cookies on your computer. These cookies are used to collect information about how you interact with our website and allow us to remember you. We use this information in order to improve and customize your browsing experience and for analytics and metrics about our visitors both on this website and other media. To find out more about the cookies we use, see our Cookies Policy